OOS 59

Shifting Dimensions: Temporal Ecology for the Next 100 Years and Beyond

Thirty years ago a transformation in ecological thinking was underway, precipitated in part by questions of how anthropogenic habitat loss and fragmentation affected populations, communities, and ecosystems. Addressing these questions required ecologists to work at scales far larger than their traditional plot sizes, statistical methods and theories allowed, and required integrating perspectives and methods from other disciplines (e.g., geography and evolution) to build upon and develop a body of theories (e.g., island biogeography, metapopulation) and concepts (edge effects and corridors). The field of spatial ecology subsequently emerged from this as an integrative, multidisciplinary science adept at developing concepts and theory to address both basic and applied ecological challenges. Alongside the human modification of space and rise of spatial ecology, anthropogenic forces have also shifted the temporal dynamics of many systems. Large-scale human modification of the earth system has impacted the temporal dynamics of many populations and ecosystems via alteration of disturbance cycles (e.g., fire), introduction of exotic species, and even habitat modification itself. Such impacts are especially apparent with climate change, which—from arctic to temperate biomes— has fundamentally altered how organisms experience time. It has also spurred a new body of research and pressed ecology to revisit fundamental questions of how temporal dynamics structure ecological systems. With the increasing availability of long-term data, however, new challenges have arisen. These include creeping timescale issues: population dynamics that appear more complex when examined in longer time series, selection that weakens when integrated over longer periods, as well as shifts in trends, including responses that reverse over time. Yet a unified field of temporal ecology—with robust theory to explain these issues—has yet to emerge. Instead, within and across disciplines, vocabularies have diverged, often producing different terms for similar concepts, highlighting the need for a common interdisciplinary forum. We argue that there is a compelling current need to develop a unified framework for temporal ecology—one that builds on new data and methods and provides a new focus for predicting how shifting environments shape populations, species, communities and ecosystems. Here we offer a starting point by bringing together speakers who have specifically considered the temporal dimension from across the fields of community ecology, evolution, paleoecology, and climate science. Our focus is on important connections with spatial ecology (autocorrelation, scaling) and the unique aspects of time (events and nonstationarity) that could form the basis of a new framework for temporal ecology.